Announcements

The HL7 MCC eCare Plan public collaborative meets biweekly on Wednesdays at 5 pm ET:

• Call Info: Phone:   +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose), +1 929 436 2866 US (New York) Meeting ID: 532 857 1160
• Webmeeting Info: https://zoom.us/j/5328571160

• To see the meeting schedule and notes from our past meeting click here.

Join the project listserv:  https://ecareplancmext.ahrq.gov/collaborateconfluence/display/EC/Join+the+Project+Listserv

• To learn more about our project and future work, view the PowerPoint here: MCC eCare Plan Overview 20200624 Final (1).pptx. To see the presentation view here

Interested in learning more about other care plan related projects visit this page here.

The MCC eCare IG is available for pre-ballot review here: https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-us-mcc/branches/master/index.html

Overview

More than 25% of Americans have MCC, accounting for more than 65% of U.S. health care spending. These individuals have complex health needs handled by diverse providers, across multiple settings of care. As a result, their care is often fragmented, poorly coordinated and inefficient. Therefore, data aggregation is particularly important and challenging for people with MCC. These challenges will increasingly strain the U.S. health system, with the aging of the US population. Projections suggest numbers of adults aged 65 and older will more than double and numbers of those aged 85 and older will triple by 2050. 

Care plans are a prominent part of multifaceted, care coordination interventions that reduce mortality and hospitalizations and improve disease management and satisfaction. In addition, proactive care planning promotes person-centeredness, improves outcomes, and reduces the cost of care. By design, care plans take a patient-centered approach, both by making comprehensive health data available across providers and settings and through the incorporation of data elements that have not traditionally been included in health IT systems (e.g., social determinants of health SDOH, patient health and life goals, patient preferences). While Care Plans have been developed, they remain paper-based in many U.S. healthcare settings and are not standardized and interoperable across care settings when electronic. While care plans focused on a single disease or condition are unlikely to be tenable for patients with MCC or their providers, existing care plans infrequently address individuals with MCC. The development of care plans based on structured data has been proposed as a method for enabling electronic systems to pull together and share data elements automatically and dynamically. Such aggregated data would not only provide actionable information to identify and achieve health and wellness goals for individuals with MCC, but also would reduce missingness and improve quality of point-of-care data for use in pragmatic research. 

The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) specification is an open-source standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically based on emerging industry approaches. The FHIR workflow specification includes a CarePlan request resource that may facilitate transfer of data for an e-care plan across healthcare settings. SMART (https://smarthealthit.org/) and SMART on FHIR standards include open specifications to integrate applications with health IT systems and may enable the development of an e-care plan application that can integrate with a variety of electronic health record (EHR) systems. 

MCC eCare Plan Overview .pptx

Project Scope

Initiated by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) with funding from the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation’s (ASPE) Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) Trust Fund, the electronic care (eCare) plan for people with multiple chronic conditions (MCC) project aims to develop, test, and pilot an interoperable eCare plan that will facilitate aggregation and sharing of critical patient-centered data across home, community, clinic, and research-based settings for persons with MCC, including chronic kidney disease (CKD), type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), cardiovascular disease (CVD), and pain with opioid use disorder (OUD).

The onset of COVID-19 has triggered investigation into the long-term consequences of COVID-19 (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV2 infection-PASC). The addition of PASC to the MCC dataset is pivotal in helping address persistent, debilitating symptoms impacting health and quality of life, especially for vulnerable populations with MCC. The inclusion of these datasets into a nationally recognized interoperability standard will propel the capture and use of MCC information at the point of care while supporting the real-time aggregation of this data for use in patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR). 

The HL7 based activities of the MCC eCare Plan Project will:

1. Identify use cases to support the documentation and exchange of MCC eCare plan data within EHRs and related systems;
2. Identify, develop and prioritize the necessary MCC data elements and clinical terminology standards, clinical information models (CIM), and FHIR® mappings that will enable the standardized transfer of data across health settings;
3. Develop and test open-source clinician, patient, and caregiver facing SMART on FHIR eCare plan applications for managing persons with MCC; and
4. Develop, test, and ballot an HL7® Fast Health Interoperability Resource (FHIR®) Implementation Guide based on the defined use cases and MCC data elements.

Additional non-HL7 related activities of the MCC eCare Plan project will be facilitated through the AHRQ eCare Plan Project Confluence.

Project objectives will be accomplished through bi-weekly one-hour virtual meetings facilitated under the current PCWG Care Plan Meeting Schedule.

The HL7 Project Scope Statement (PSS) is available here: PSS

HL7 FHIR IG Proposal: MCC FHIR IG Proposal

Upcoming MCC eCare Plan Project Meeting

The MCC e-Care Plan Project Meetings take place on various Wednesdays from 5:00 - 6:00 pm ET. MCC meetings agenda are posted here and the full Patient Care Work Group meeting schedule can be viewed here. 

Meeting connection details for MCC e-Care Plan Project Meetings is available below.

Zoom Meeting URL https://zoom.us/j/5328571160

Dial by your location

        +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)

        +1 929 436 2866 US (New York)

Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aemmW7I5Zo

Meeting ID: 532 857 1160

Project Timeline

2021-2024 Roadmap

2019-2022 Roadmap

 Project Contacts 

Resources

• Link to Relevant Websites:
  • AHRQ/NIDDK eCare Plan Project Site 
  • ASPE Data Capacity for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Through Creation of an Electronic Care Plan for People with MCC
  • NIDDK eCare Plan Technical Expert Panel Kick-Off
  • AHRQ Multiple Chronic Condition Network